Month: November 1996

When Americans go to the polls tomorrow, they will be voting in perhaps the least important election since World War II. There are no great ideological dividing lines in this presidential election. Arguably, the mid-term congressional election was more important than this presidential election. At least then there was a clearer division between the promises of the two parties, even if after less than two years the Republicans’ contract with America to wind back the extent of government had been frustrated or broken before the ink was dry.

Indeed, the events over the past four years reveal how the American system tends to constantly draw policy, politics and politicians towards the centre. This is because of the system of checks and balances, where the head of the executive, in the form of the President, is elected entirely separately from the legislature in the form of the Congress and that the President does not choose his or her Cabinet from members of the Congress but from people who must be apart from it, even though their appointments must be approved by it. Another check and balance lies in the fact that the President can veto legislation, but the veto can be overridden by a two-thirds majority of each house of Congress. And further, the states have a separate fount of power and there is another check against the exercise of power in the Bill of Rights and the Constitution, as interpreted by the Supreme Court, whose members in turn are appointed for life by the President.

So Americans will be voting for a representative, a senator, the president, and often a state governor and state congressional members on the same day. The power of those elected will be fettered, unlike in Britain where people vote for one MP and the person who leads the party with the most MPs has virtually unfettered power.
Continue reading “1996_11_november_leader03nov us poll”

Developments in Manuka, Ainslie, Bruce Stadium and the futsal park have caused disquiet in the community for a variety of reasons, whereas in each case the Government pleads purity of purpose, usually a purpose to bring money and jobs to the town and amenity to its residents. The projects have been individually condemned for lack of consultation and fear that public assets are being squandered or hands over to private hands without the public getting value for money.

Privatisation can be opposed on ideological grounds, but the criticism on financial grounds can be blunted if it is done in the sunshine.

Bruce Stadium is a good example. If it had been sold outright to a private company at open auction, the ACT Government might have escaped much of the criticism that is not purely ideological. As it is, Chief Minister Kate Carnell has come under fire from her own Ministers for not consulting more widely. The Government has also come under fire for announcing that it would contribute $27 million to the upgrade without having budgeted for it, without putting it to the Assembly and without consulting anyone. It seems it was put on the spur of the moment to attract soccer as an Olympic sport. Or if it was not a spur-of-the-moment decision it must have been kept unduly secret from the Assembly, the main players and the public in a way that has prevented them from influencing the carriage of events.
Continue reading “1996_11_november_leader02nov”

Much of the Australian business is ill-prepared for the radical changes the Internet poses to the way the world works.

Boardrooms full of men who made money with successful businesses in the 1970s and who are unfamiliar with Internet technology dominate business thinking in Australia, while business in America is embracing the Internet.

Australian business appears not to understand the opportunities nor grasp the threat. That threat is huge.

The mantra that old technologies always survive or that people will always want the hard copy airline ticket, newspaper or fax is a comforting delusion in the face of the overwhelming force of economics and marketing.

I have been reading an advance copy of Daniel Petre and David Harrington’s The Clever Country. Australia’s Digital Future, which is to be published next month.

I share a lot of views with them and was touched by the IBM story.

IBM was the largest and most profitable manufacturer of computers and software in the world in the 1970s. They concentrated on mainframes which the senior people at IBM knew would remain the main game forever and that these silly personal computers would never have enough power to do a real job. A few middle management people at IBM who thought the company should get into PCs and make in their main business were treated as traitors and pariahs.

Similarly, as a newspaper journalist I get howls of derision when I say that in less than a decade the main business of the companies that at present produce newspapers will be Internet provision of material, or they will not exist.

But it is not just newspapers. The Internet will radically alter great swathes of retailing and services industries and if Australian business does not wake up there are plenty of competitors out there to chews them up. We can only hope that Australian business adapts quickly or at least that the new competitors are Australian.

Take airlines. A US airline enables people to look at all scheduled flights on the Internet, see if there are vacant seats, book a seat, pay with a credit card, arrive at the airport with ID and get a boarding pass. No ticket, no travel agent, no staff intervention at the airline’s booking counter. The savings for the US airline with every ticket booked this way are enormous.

There is, of course, a drawback. Not many people are on the Internet.

That is true now, but more people are connecting at critical mass will be reached much sooner than most people imagine.

Interestingly, Petre and Harrington are publishing in book form. There is no use preaching to the converted on the Internet.

Take the retail music business. (Incidentally, the old technology of vinyl records is extinct, along with theatre newsreels, telex machines, telegrams and almost typewriters.) Several businesses offer searching and buying of CDs over the Internet. No expensive retail stores, very few staff, very small inventory, few overheads. The savings are passed on the customers.

The Internet is an excellent vehicle for “”commodity” retailing of things that customers do not need to see or touch before buying, like CDs and books.

The CD retailers and airlines using the Internet are smart. They are getting the customer to do the expensive work of finding out what they want and the customers enjoy it and get better service.

It is no good Australian businesses saying the Internet is an interesting plaything to post a bit of static information for one or two curious people to look at. They have to start using it as the major way of doing business.

At present they may think they can be complacent. The Internet is expensive. It costs $2000 for a computer with a modem and $30 a month for access. But those costs are continually coming down.

The software is still too hard to use. It is not plug and play, but plug and pray. It often requires technical mucking about to make it work. But the Internet providers are getting smarter and it is getting easier for ordinary mortals to connect. The phone lines, modems and software are improving so that information (including sound, pictures and video) can be received more quickly.

The huge pressure is coming from children and from people on the Internet extolling its virtues to others.

The amount of easily accessible educational, medical and legal information on the Internet is astounding. Medical information that doctors do not have the time (or sometimes the inclination) to give you is available for every condition known to humans.

Those that are on it get the benefits of e-mail. You write a letter to anyone in the world and it is delivered within seconds.

As more people connect, the business opportunities and threats increase. As with most technologies initial growth is quite slow in absolute numbers, but in percentage terms is quite high. Then a critical mass is reached quite quickly and business has to respond or perish.

Petre and Harrington suggest that media businesses are very vulnerable. The shortcomings of television information are enormous. People have to watch half an hour of news and advertisements to get a 30-second grab of the one or two things they are interested in.

Television and newspaper advertising is costly and inefficient. A message goes to millions who resent it just to get the few people who want it. This is advertising wastage. Existing mass media boast to potential advertisers about the thousands of people they reach and that advertisers should pay huge amounts for this. But the advertiser is not interested in the thousands of people; only those who will make contact and possibly buy. The only use of the additional thousands of people is that the advertisers knows that the sub-set of people they are really after is in there somewhere. Sure, it works but it is very inefficient.

Internet advertising is paid for only according to the number of people who actually click on the advertisement. The advertiser will pay dearly for far fewer people. The real estate agents only wants the 10 people actively interested in buying a house in the inner south; they do not care about the other 199,990 people who happen to glance through the paper.

Either way, they will pay dearly for those 10 people; but a smart user of the Internet can deliver them more cheaply, either passing on the savings to the agent and home-buyer or keeping them … depending on competitive pressures.

Some existing businesses recognise that the Internet poses a mild threat, but they underestimate its potential and react the wrong way. They do not want to engage the Internet themselves, because it could erode existing business. But if they do not, someone else will, because huge efficiencies can be made.

The big leap for most businesses is the idea that customers should get direct access to their computer system to get information, sot hat virtually every business has a web site. Customers should be able to access the dry-cleaner, bank, retailer, doctor, dentist, hospital for general information and specific information about the state of their account and for the customer to send queries. It can be done securely with computer firewalls.

But surely, people will want to continue the personal interaction of paying bills in person and asking over the phone or over the counter. Yes, people do want social action; they do want to see and feel and they do prefer to read on paper rather than on screen. But will they pay for it after a critical mass builds up that provides such huge efficiencies with electronic transactions that businesses charge extra for personal interaction. Will people pay an extra $10 a CD for the privilege of browsing titles in a shop? Will they pay several dollars extra for the paper version of a newspaper after many of the classified advertisements go on line and achieve the advertisers’ desired outcome without needing them in print?

We have seen this already with bank counter transactions being charged more than transactions at ATM machines. It is a very small example of what is to come. Like it or not, social interaction gets swept aside by efficiency and profit. The only joy is that if all mundane commercial transactions become more efficient we may get more time for a richer social life.

Petre and Harrington worry that Australian businesses are ill-informed, complacent and not flexible enough to use the Internet profitably and that multi-nationals will move in to the gap. I am more optimistic. I agree with them that the changes posed by the Internet will be quite profound and are likely to come sooner than most people think. And judging from some of the static sites of big Australian companies, it seems their managers are in danger of being left behind. But I think new Australian companies are as likely as overseas companies to fill the gaps left by the dinosaurs and that in any event many large Australian companies will show extraordinary speed and versatility once the threat and opportunities get closer.

That said, Petre and Harrington express well-founded concern that Australian educational institutions are not producing enough people trained in creating Internet sites and that we are not building Internet infrastructure quickly enough to ensure that we export more information than we import.

It is likely that whereas much information on the Internet is now free, there will come a time when software will allow efficient transfer of huge numbers of transactions involving very small amounts of money … a few cents per file, perhaps. When this happens, it will be critical that Australian sites are used by foreigners more often than Australians use international sites.

Let’s hope we are a clever enough country.

Daniel Petre and David Harrington. The Clever Country. Australia’s Digital Future. Pan Macmillan. 192pp.

If is just as well the frailties and fickleness of human nature are so constant. It has meant that Shakespeare has not dated.

This week Shakespeare’s play Coriolanus is being performed in Canberra by the Bell Shakespeare Company. Coriolanus is perhaps one of Shakespeare’s least performed or read plays. In it Coriolanus, a Roman, wins a great victory against the Volscians and is persuaded by the upper class patricians to stand for the consulship which requires approval by the plebeians. The plebeians’ nominal leaders, the tribunes, successfully urge the plebeians to give their approval. But Coriolanus becomes arrogant, causing the plebeians (at the urging of their tribunes) to seek his death. Coriolanus is utterly obstinate and refuses to compromise despite the pleadings of his fellow patricians. The plebeians banish him. Coriolanus then joins the Volscians a leads them successfully to the gates of Rome. At the last minute he is dissuaded by his mother from the final assault and a peace is made, which does not last long because the Volscians kill Coriolanus in revenge.

It was the last of the Roman plays, and set the tone for Shakespeare’s lesser known Australian play _ Costello.

In Costello, the hero wins a great victory for a patrician confectionery company against the invading union hordes. The patricians persuade him to stand for Parliament. There he obstinately demands all his measures be passed exactly as presented and threatens war if they are not. He ignores the lessons of a fellow patrician who, using compromise, negotiation and charm, achieves great statutes and in doing so shows how women are great catalysts for peaceful negotiation.
Continue reading “1996_11_november_coriolanus for foum”

Some traffic inspectors joined a police random-breath-testing-station a week ago and inspected 1000 cars and found that 12 per cent of them were “”defective”, and on this paltry evidence the busy-bodies and do-gooders want to reinstitute compulsory annual testing of all vehicles in the ACT.

Their attitude is that the whole class will stay in after school until all of the class gets all of their spelling right.

I will ignore the obvious self-serving motive of traffic inspectors who would like to command an army of white-coated mechanics to prod and pry and tick and cross.

The main question is whether annual testing is worth the cost. It may give some motorists a self-righteous glow that they have passed the test. (Perhaps they should have awarded credits, distinctions and high distinctions instead of mere passes and fails.) But the quality of drivers and to some extent roads cause far more death and injury on the road than car defects.
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